The late actor’s beauty was used for a string of roles, including Love Story and Paper Moon, but he also displayed a rare comic prowess

Ryan O’Neal, Hollywood actor and star of Love Story, dies aged 82

There were plenty of handsome leading men in the Hollywood of the early 70s: Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds … but none of them were as purely and fascinatingly pretty as Ryan O’Neal, none with that cherubic pertness, complicated with a kind of wounded vulnerability: a pout, a frown, a beguiling flash of femininity to go with the dreamboat male-lead looks, which went hand-in-hand also with something worldly and hard-edged.

It is a great moment in 1973’s The Thief Who Came To Dinner when Ryan O’Neal’s jewel thief coolly inveigles himself into a fancy society soiree and Jacqueline Bisset is taken aback and perhaps even jealous of that brazen, faintly...